For Immediate Release

Preliminary assessment places Andy Peralta’s death within a broader documented pattern of NYPD pursuit escalation, underreporting, and disproportionate harm — and demands immediate action by City Hall, the City Council, and the New York Attorney General

NEW YORK, NEW YORK — April 20, 2026 — Eric Sanders, Esq., owner and president of The Sanders Firm, P.C., has been retained by the mother of decedent Andy Peralta to investigate the circumstances surrounding his death, including allegations that NYPD Police Officers Dylan R. Piedra and Albert A. Tejada were involved in an unlawful, unauthorized police pursuit before the fatal collision.

The official police accident report presents Peralta’s death as a simple motorcycle-and-bus collision and states that the matter is under investigation by Highway Patrol Collision Investigation Squad #1, CIS #326-11. But what the report does not say is just as important as what it does say: it contains no reference to any NYPD pursuit, no NYPD vehicle, no officers following Peralta, no radio activity, and no mention of Officers Dylan R. Piedra or Albert A. Tejada. The report also leaves blank the section for police-vehicle involvement and identifies no civilian witnesses, even though it states that approximately 20 passengers were on the MTA bus. If Peralta was in fact being unlawfully pursued before the fatal collision, then the official report omitted the central issue now under investigation.

Sanders has reviewed video evidence that appears to show an NYPD patrol vehicle trailing Peralta immediately before the fatal collision. The vehicle does not appear to have its emergency lights activated. That is significant because the official police accident report says nothing about any NYPD vehicle, any pursuit, any police follow, any radio activity, or any involvement by Officers Piedra or Tejada. If that footage is confirmed, then the official report did not merely leave out a detail. It omitted a material part of the pre-collision sequence.

That omission would raise serious questions about reporting integrity, supervisory awareness, and whether police conduct contributing to the fatal sequence was concealed after the fact.

The investigation will examine whether NYPD personnel engaged in off-radio pursuit activity, whether that activity was concealed or underreported after the fact, whether Department rules governing vehicle pursuits were violated, and whether official records were created, withheld, altered, or omitted in a manner that obscured the true sequence of events.

“At this stage, the family is entitled to facts, not silence,” said Sanders. “If the evidence confirms that NYPD officers engaged in an off-radio, unauthorized pursuit before this fatal collision, then this was not merely a traffic fatality. It was a fatal event shaped by police conduct, and that conduct demands full scrutiny, full disclosure, and full accountability.”

Sanders’ assessment is grounded in a documented citywide pattern. NYPD vehicle pursuits rose from 214 in 2022 to 1,592 in 2023 and 1,930 in 2024, while pursuit-related crashes rose from 84 in 2022 to 318 in 2023 and 421 in 2024. On a monthly basis, pursuits increased from 7.7 in the pre-escalation period to 159.3 during the post-Maddrey period, while pursuit-related collisions rose from 5.5 per month to 34.4 per month. The Bronx experienced the highest post-escalation pursuit increase relative to baseline, approximately 21-fold. This was not a minor operational shift. It was a massive expansion in pursuit activity, followed by a sharp increase in collision harm.

That gap in public accounting became even more alarming when investigative reporting by THE CITY, based on a disclosure request that the NYPD took 15 months to fulfill, uncovered three previously unreported pursuit-related deaths, bringing the two-year death total to 20. According to that reporting, 18 of the 20 people who died were Black or brown. The same reporting described stretches of 2023 and 2024 in which the Department’s pursuit practices produced more than a collision per day on average, numerous deaths, and hundreds of injuries, including to bystanders.

One of those previously unreported deaths was 15-year-old Johnny Zhagnay Chuqui, who was riding his electric bike with a handful of friends in the early hours of July 1, 2024, in an industrial part of Astoria when, according to THE CITY, he was being chased by police, ran through a stop sign, and was struck by a privately operated bus. He died the next day at Elmhurst Hospital. The reporting further states that his mother said the NYPD still had not told her why officers were chasing her son and had ignored her requests to view security camera footage so she could assess the circumstances for herself, including the speed of the bus. The Department reportedly declined to explain why officers were pursuing the teenager and said only that the matter remained under investigation by the Force Investigation Division, while the Office of the New York State Attorney General was conducting a preliminary assessment to determine whether police conduct played a role in the fatality. That account underscores a larger concern: pursuit-related deaths involving young riders have not always been fully or promptly reflected in the public record, families have been left without basic answers, and fatal police encounters have too often been followed by delay, opacity, and incomplete disclosure rather than immediate transparency and accountability.

The concern is sharpened further by the fact that Officer Albert A. Tejada is also a defendant in a pending federal civil-rights case in the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York, Bladimir Valdez v. City of New York, et al., 25-cv-07610, involving allegations of a similar pursuit sequence. That separate case does not establish liability here. It does, however, intensify the need to determine whether the events preceding Peralta’s death were isolated or instead part of a broader enforcement pattern within the 52nd Precinct involving unlawful pursuit practices and failures of reporting integrity.

The investigation will also examine whether NYPD personnel complied with the Department’s own revised vehicle-pursuit rules, which took effect on February 1, 2025. Those rules bar pursuits where the most serious offense is a traffic infraction, violation, or non-violent misdemeanor, state that a pursuit is not authorized based solely on the fact that a vehicle is fleeing a stop, and require specific post-pursuit records, including a Vehicle Pursuit Report, Automatic Vehicle Location data, Domain Awareness System event reports, supervisory review, commanding-officer review, and consideration of disciplinary action.

The Office of the New York State Attorney General has already warned that there is no mandatory centralized database for high-speed pursuit information in New York and has called for standardized statewide reporting and far narrower pursuit authority because police chases increase danger and lead to injury and death. That warning goes directly to the problem now confronting Peralta’s family: families are too often left to reconstruct fatal police events from fragments rather than from a complete and truthful official record.

“These allegations must be judged against the larger record already in public view,” Sanders said. “The public already knows pursuit activity surged. The public already knows collisions and deaths followed. The public already knows three deaths were missing from the earlier public count. The public already knows that 18 of 20 documented pursuit-related deaths over that period were Black or brown. And the public already knows that the Bronx saw the most dramatic escalation relative to baseline. Against that backdrop, a fatal collision preceded by an alleged concealed pursuit cannot be dismissed as routine police work. It must be treated as a potential abuse of police power followed by a failure of reporting integrity.”

Sanders is calling on Mayor Zohran Mamdani and the New York City Council to move beyond internal NYPD policy and impose binding, enforceable citywide restrictions on police pursuits, including stricter limits on when a pursuit may begin, mandatory public reporting of all pursuits and pursuit-related injuries and deaths, rapid disclosure of body-worn camera and dash-camera footage in fatal cases, and meaningful independent review whenever a pursuit ends in serious physical injury or death.

Sanders is also calling on New York Attorney General Letitia James to conduct a full and fair investigation into the events leading to Peralta’s death, the officers’ conduct during the incident, the Department’s reporting and supervisory response, and any effort to conceal the pursuit after the fact. If that investigation establishes criminal wrongdoing, those responsible should be prosecuted.

“This cannot be treated as business as usual,” Sanders said. “If the evidence shows there was an unlawful pursuit, an off-radio pursuit, a concealed pursuit, or false or incomplete reporting afterward, then the response cannot stop at internal review. The City must impose stronger restraints on the Department, and the Attorney General must follow the evidence wherever it leads, including criminal prosecution if the facts warrant it.”

The Firm’s investigation is now underway. The Firm will pursue all available evidence, including radio transmissions, body-worn camera records, vehicle-location data, internal pursuit reports, dispatch records, surveillance footage, supervisory communications, and all materials bearing on whether this pursuit was concealed after the fact.

“Mr. Peralta’s mother retained counsel for one reason,” Sanders said. “She wants the truth about what happened to her son. She is entitled to it. And so is the public.”

Media Contact

###